Hello everyone!
I need to pay better attention to everything if I'm being honest.
That aside, however, there's something to be said about interstellar adventures and excitement, something that people always seem so keen on. Especially nowadays with the additional exploration and deep dive on Mars, I can easily imagine this becoming an even bigger emphasis eventually.
Sure it's sci-fi, but at the same time it IS a possibility!
Well, if you don't count in the fact that some of the stuff is completely absurd. I can't decide whether it's Star Wars or Star Trek that wins in THAT department.
But before I lose myself in too many notes right off the bat, I should probably tell you what book we're looking into.
It's Claudia Gray's Into the Dark, and, man ... yeah, it goes dark alright.
The link to the first book in the installment can be found at the bottom of this page - I'm hoping that I can also get my hands on one of the other, children's books that came in between, because I feel like I'm missing out on a character who gets mentioned here.
I would also like to point out that some of this book overlaps with Light of the Jedi, but I didn't figure it out until somewhere down the middle, because no one actually points it out. I suppose if you've enjoyed the first book then you'll remember the important details, but other than the Starlight Beacon, a few of the Jedi that will be serving on it, and the fact there was a hyperspace disaster, the particulars escape me, which is never a good sign.
Master Jora Malli is the one who overlaps, here introduced with her Padawan Reath who loves Coruscant and puttering through the Archives, and who isn't happy about their assignment on the far frontier, but he doesn't know how to convince his master to stay behind.
She, on the other hand, gives him a simple question: why can no Jedi walk alone through the Kyber Arch in the Jedi Temple?
With that, she then leaves, ends up in the middle of the disaster, and also ends up dead, but before Reath can learn about that, he needs to have an adventure of his own.
He, Knight Dez and Masters Cohmac and Orla are on their way to Starlight Beacon when their ship gets thrown out of hyperspace because of debris, along with a number of others; their pilots, Leox and Affie, notice there's a chance of solar flares, and that there's an Amaxine station nearby, abandoned, but potentially still something that can shield them (Amaxines being a war-like race that are apparently extinct at this point).
So the group takes refuge there with the other ships currently stranded in this corner of deep space while the hyperlanes are closed, and naturally when you have all walks of life, there will be arguments and fights breaking out. The three Jedi have their work cut out for them to keep the peace even in this small group, and Reath actually saves a young woman, Nan, from being taken into slavery.
Then comes the fun part.
All of the Jedi receive visions of some unexplained and unspeakable darkness, and in their search through the station, they not only find that some plants of the arboretum that's on there are poisonous (Affie needs to get some medicine, stat), that the gardening droids on the station might decide to prune them to death if they aren't careful, and that the lower levels are even more dangerous as they cause Dez to supposedly die in a flash of light and helix rings.
However, the most important bit here is the discovery of four statues, four idols of sorts, who seem to be the source of all the darkness, and the Jedi cart them back to Coruscant with them once they're allowed to leave again, thinking to make them safe in the Temple.
As it turns out, that's a no-go, because it isn't the idols that are the problem.
The idols were there to KEEP SOMETHING ELSE DORMANT.
Naturally, this means that Cohmac, Orla and Reath, along with Affie, Leox and Geode their navigator, go right back to the station, with some other intentions in tow as well (Reath learns Nan is actually part of the Nihil so he wants to bring her to justice if he can, and Affie has an agenda of her own having discovered the station is used by the guild she and Leox work for as some sort of stop, but more importantly that the guild still has indentured servants, something the Republic has strict policies about, and that her parents were a few of those, dying because they were trying to get free faster).
They run into a large Nihil ship there, of course, but bring the idols back before they can get plant-ed to death, so there's one thing.
See, here's what happened: Reath discovers the truth when he accidentally uses the same rings as Dez, sending himself through hyperspace to a pre-determined location, learning that said location is the home world of the Drengir (no, not the courageous warriors from Assassin's Creed: Valhalla), plant-like sentient beings who long ago defeated the Amaxines, but they were so dangerous the Sith parked the idols on the station to keep the Darkness at bay.
Reath also finds out Dez is still alive, but he's been tortured and is forced to fight Reath through some poison, which the young men manage to counteract enough so they can travel back to the station - revealed to be a sort of home base for the Amaxines from where they could explore the galaxy and choose their new targets - where the dormant Drengir are put back under when the idols are reactivated.
Of course that's also when the Nihil start making problems, so Orla breaks the seal again, allowing the two enemy groups to have at it while the Jedi and their friends escape back to the ship.
Nan and Reath have a final confrontation in which she lets him go because he saved her life, but she also warns him he won't be so lucky again; Reath then does the smartest thing he can by sending out all the transport pods to useless locations in the galaxy from which they can't return, which makes the station nothing more than a hunk of junk in space.
After a few more hair-raising moments, our heroes then return to Coruscant where the Jedi Council is a little miffed that they disobeyed the suggestions given to them, but since they stopped a huge darkness from spreading, that's alright. Reath asks Cohmac to be his new Master, and the two of them head to the Starlight Beacon together (Reath also learns why no Jedi can walk through the Arch alone: because there is no I in team, and the Jedi work as a group towards a greater goal, not for their own interests). Orla purchases a ship of her own to finally become a Wayseeker, that is, a Jedi working more independently from the Temple and finding her own way with the Force.
And Affie turns in her mother figure from the guild because of the indentured servitude, as she and Leox become their own masters on their ship for further adventures.
But of course the story doesn't end there, as we witness Nan coming to Marchion Ro, the leader of the Nihil, telling him about the Jedi and warning him, and he promises the Nihil will be the ones to defeat them.
THE END
I forgot to mention - there's a backstory of Cohmac and Orla as Padawans which details their first serious mission together during which Cohmac's master dies, as well as one of the hostages they're rescuing, and where Orla's instincts differ from her training so she starts doubting the Force and the Council. The importance here is her reasoning to become a Wayseeker, and the fact that the Beacon is positioned close to the homeworlds of the two then-kidnapped monarchs.
To be fair, however, that story could have been summarized in a few pages without the unnecessary jumping back and forth into it, but I digress.
IN THEORY there's nothing wrong with the book - a couple of Jedi, Padawans, and a few civilians end up stranded on an abandoned station with a lot of plants and spooky things start happening, the Jedi try to fix a problem with the Dark Side only to actually make it worse, and then to end it once and for all the Padawan chooses an unorthodox way to make the station useless to any scavengers around, including the Nihil, then accepts some hard lessons and moves along.
I was actually rather fond of Reath and Cohmac, both of whom are more academic Jedi, but I was also smiling when Orla's Wayseeker destiny was revealed, because what she's doing sounds a lot like what Filoni did with Ahsoka back in TCW, and I am here for it. I always knew Ahsoka was just a different type of Jedi, but still a Jedi. The white lightsaber were also a good clue!
I enjoyed Affie and Leox too - Geode though got old really fast, but then again, he was a rock. An alien rock being, but still a rock, for the most part.
The thing that drew the line for me were the plants. Or, Drengir.
Fresh off Valhalla, where drengr means a fierce warrior, I kept thinking about that as I read, and, in theory at least, the Drengir ARE terrifying, I suppose. They have also not been introduced that well as such, however, because let's be frank: a plant-like thing trying to kill you? It sounds like something out of a B-list horror movie, and not a good one. Here I was complaining about Thrawn in the Thrawn Trilogy using plants to eavesdrop, but this tops the cake. I could even get behind his methods now.
But overall, I'm unimpressed, because I'm not sure the High Republic idea knows who it wants as the main antagonist - the Nihil, or the Drengir, or someone else entirely? LUCKILY we didn't actually have an active Nihil presence with plotting and scheming and raiding in this book, which made it more palatable to me, but even so I rolled my eyes at the last scene with Marchion Ro and Nan. I was actually more into the backstory that explained some Hutt presence, because the Hutts are a fairly scary notion. But let me explain myself:
when the Sith and the Jedi go head to head, it makes sense, because both are Force users and therefore equals. When you have non-Force users it's a bit like a problem with teenage superhero shoes; it beggars belief that a 15-year-old would be able to defeat a supervillain who'd defeated the kid's dad 20 years ago, purely because of experience and power. It's the same here. WHY should we be worried about the Nihil, who aside from their Paths come across as basically just marauding pirates with no Force sensitivity whatsoever? Sure, those were funny in TCW and got the drop on our heroes on occasion, but they never actually WON and they were never taken as a serious threat in the waning days of the Jedi Order.
Our current Jedi are supposedly AT THEIR PEAK. And you're telling me some random band of merry ho-ho-hos is going to take them down? Unless they produce a Sith from somewhere in their "master" plans, I'm not buying what Marchion Ro is selling, and I doubt I ever will, because it doesn't make sense.
So it was a mixed bag for me. The adventure was enjoyable, taken out of the bigger context the High Republic books want to establish. But it was problematic that I forgot Jora Malli was a character I should have remembered from the first book, because I didn't. This doesn't bode well for the future, but it is what it is.
Okay, but could have been better.
I was actually rather fond of Reath and Cohmac, both of whom are more academic Jedi, but I was also smiling when Orla's Wayseeker destiny was revealed, because what she's doing sounds a lot like what Filoni did with Ahsoka back in TCW, and I am here for it. I always knew Ahsoka was just a different type of Jedi, but still a Jedi. The white lightsaber were also a good clue!
I enjoyed Affie and Leox too - Geode though got old really fast, but then again, he was a rock. An alien rock being, but still a rock, for the most part.
The thing that drew the line for me were the plants. Or, Drengir.
Fresh off Valhalla, where drengr means a fierce warrior, I kept thinking about that as I read, and, in theory at least, the Drengir ARE terrifying, I suppose. They have also not been introduced that well as such, however, because let's be frank: a plant-like thing trying to kill you? It sounds like something out of a B-list horror movie, and not a good one. Here I was complaining about Thrawn in the Thrawn Trilogy using plants to eavesdrop, but this tops the cake. I could even get behind his methods now.
But overall, I'm unimpressed, because I'm not sure the High Republic idea knows who it wants as the main antagonist - the Nihil, or the Drengir, or someone else entirely? LUCKILY we didn't actually have an active Nihil presence with plotting and scheming and raiding in this book, which made it more palatable to me, but even so I rolled my eyes at the last scene with Marchion Ro and Nan. I was actually more into the backstory that explained some Hutt presence, because the Hutts are a fairly scary notion. But let me explain myself:
when the Sith and the Jedi go head to head, it makes sense, because both are Force users and therefore equals. When you have non-Force users it's a bit like a problem with teenage superhero shoes; it beggars belief that a 15-year-old would be able to defeat a supervillain who'd defeated the kid's dad 20 years ago, purely because of experience and power. It's the same here. WHY should we be worried about the Nihil, who aside from their Paths come across as basically just marauding pirates with no Force sensitivity whatsoever? Sure, those were funny in TCW and got the drop on our heroes on occasion, but they never actually WON and they were never taken as a serious threat in the waning days of the Jedi Order.
Our current Jedi are supposedly AT THEIR PEAK. And you're telling me some random band of merry ho-ho-hos is going to take them down? Unless they produce a Sith from somewhere in their "master" plans, I'm not buying what Marchion Ro is selling, and I doubt I ever will, because it doesn't make sense.
So it was a mixed bag for me. The adventure was enjoyable, taken out of the bigger context the High Republic books want to establish. But it was problematic that I forgot Jora Malli was a character I should have remembered from the first book, because I didn't. This doesn't bode well for the future, but it is what it is.
Okay, but could have been better.
xx
*image not mine
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